FriendFeed gets my posts, Twice

I’ve noticed that there is a lag between my post being published and it showing up in FF (From Michel Arrington’s stream):

 

I’ve actually noticed that this is becoming the exception rather than the norm slowly but surely:

Nevertheless I wrote a plugin for Windows Live Writer that automatically posts a link to FriendFeed every time I publish a post. In fact the link in the above picture ws posted using this plugin

Since I’ve never written a WLW plugin I used the Twitter Notify plugin that is included as part of the SDK as a springboard. You might notice that there is very little code left of the original.

Since it uses the new SDK feature unavailable in WLW 2.0, you’ll need the WLW 3.0 CTP for this plugin to work.

You can get it from Codeplex here.

It will ask you for your FriendFeed username and Remote Key as well as a preamble to accompany the posted link. This is set, by default, to “Blog Post”. As you can see mine is set to “New Blog Post”. All these settings can be changed from the Plugins page of WLW options.

Suggestions are welcome as are bug fixes, etc.

The plugin is working well for me and I’ve encountered no issues, other than WLW taking slightly longer to start up ( this could be a CTP issue).

I currently thinking of:

• Putting a link to the discussion on FF in the post( as far as I can tell this would require a re-write)
• Linking to FF when you Update the post

Anyone else got any ideas?

Quote of the Day

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
  - Edward R. Murrow

Online Aggregation - a la FriendFeed

If you read regularly, you’ve probably begun to wonder where i’ve been these past few weeks. I’m not blaming you.

Between FriendFeed and exams there aren’t enough hours in the day.

FreindFeed itself is great. Being able to aggregate so much data in one place is very useful. FF ( as FriendFeed is shortened to) supports 35 ( or more) services directly and more through the use of the RSS feed(s) that you can add.

Robert Scoble is the prime example of this. The sheer amount of online output the man generates makes you wonder if he ever sleeps.  Go on, click the link and admire this river of news, posts, tweets, videos and photos. Then take a look at how many friends the guys has- well over 10,000 people as friends ( people that either are subscribed to him or he subscribes to). FF has a Friend of a Friend feature that add some of his friends posts to your home page on FF. This gives you a tremendous amount of noise to wade through.

And combine this with all your other friends. This gives you a long, long river of news to read through.

However, FF is not a true social networking site. It aggregates data from a huge amount of sites. But your Friends are nothing more than people you’ve subscribed to for their feed. Its rather like saying that because you have a subscription to the NYT you are their friend and they’re yours.

To reinforce the point there is zero information about you save a picture - which suits me as you’ll notice I don’t have an About Me page ( I’m thinking about putting one up, though). And I’m dithering on what picture I should put up.

Jennifer Woodward Maderazo made the point that its very personal having all this information in one place. Possibly. It depends on what information you share. Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk have no problem with this - they’re subscribed to practically every service available. I mean, its darn interesting to see what photos Thomas favourites on Flickr. I’m sure its possible to figure out his taste in photos and his political leanings from his content. Even how he likes Mac and  Microsoft solely for its Windows Media Centre.  But there is no real, personal  information being shared here.

On Jennifer’s second point about no real interaction - come on!! I comment more in FF than outside, often commenting as a post comes in, and as part of a conversation. I like a lot as well ( comments and likes are another way if discerning peoples taste - but no real information is there. See above). If there is anything to suggest its no otherwise the case, its that comments don’t follow items as they are ReShared or posted within FF. This inevitably leads to fragmented conversations and a reduction in interaction. Also blog and FF comments should be synced in some form that will lead to even more interaction.

And Jennifer’s last point about information overload is just plain wrong. We have fine grained control of what turns up in our feed. from hiding friends of friends completely to hiding on a per-friend-per-service basis ( you can also blanket hide a service entirely - so no Twitter tweets show up from any friend, ever).

The Flickr favourites feature I mentioned above is a compelling reason to join Flickr ( I’m with SmugMug and intend to stay - you’ll see my photos show up).

One thing that is surprising is that FF is slowing taking attention share away from Google Reader. Not just when it comes to commenting, but I post links that I find interesting. Steve Rubel, for example, tweets and posts links fairly often that point to interesting material - I share some. But those don’t show up in my Shared items to your right ( from Google Reader Shared items). I’m thinking of some way to integrate them together using the FF API.

Another reason is the Imaginary Friend feature. I currently only have one at the moment - MarsPhoenix. If that sounds familiar to you its that lander NASA just put on Mars’ north pole. Its got two blogs and a twitter feed. This Friend combines them into a one feed with posts from both blogs mixed in with the numerous tweet updates and makes it dead easy to follow via FF or RSS. These appear as fart of my feed on the FF homepage along with everything else, making it doubly useful.

FF is literally Google Reader gone wild (rather than Twitter). Its subscriptions based. And, one up on Google Reader, shares all of your online activity back to the community. Its not even Digg (I can’t remember the last time I logged in to Digg).

Many belive that Robert will be going on about another service in a few months time. But FF has the traction ( its many services and thus audiences that it serves) and the leverage (the huge number of adopters it has at the moment) to survive. It straddles the difference between a true, thoroughbred networking site like Twitter ( or Facebook, if you prefer) and the disconnected consumption of content of a RSS reader. Its perfectly situated to bridge the gap between all these disparate services.

Quote of the Day (this one is actually funny)

Robert Scoble and 20000 people walk into a bar. The bar man goes….

Speaking about ears, I have to say that Robert had some of the biggest ears ever seen on a human being, with the possible exception of Barack Obama. While people always talked about Robert’s big mouth, Robert said that his big ears, which allowed him to hear almost anything, were more important than his big mouth.

Know Robert Scoble? Know Twitter? Heard of FriendFeed? Read the rest of the (hilarious) story here.

Blog Directions

So, this is supposed to be a tech blog (along with the few hundred thousand of them already out there). Thing is that I’ve only used it for two things lately: Youtube videos to do with Apple and various complaints mostly to do with Google et al.

I need to narrow the scope down a bit. not quite sure exactly what on. Lets go through it.

SQL Server? I get the basics but I’d rather use Subsonic any day of the week.

ASP.net? Yes, but 2.0. I’ve used the Visual Studio 2008 and it rocks for web design, so a tour of Visual Web Designer Express 2008 sounds good.

Visual Basic 8.0? Again, I haven’t got round to using it, at least not with .Net 3.5. I’m rather good at VB, if I do say so myself.

C# 3.0? The C version of VB ( I’m kidding ), but yeah getting to grips with it might prove entertaining.

LINQ? Haven’t touched it, though I’ve diligently read Scott’s posts on the topic. It sure rocks so I might take it for asp on some Commerce Starter Kit databases I have lying around.

Virtual Server? I actually had a draft post about that lying around somewhere. I’ll get it up as soon as I’ve completed taking VS for a test drive ( always handy to have a copy of Windows Server 2003 and SQL 2005  lying around).

Networking?? I’m laying gigabit throughout the house to a central 24-port switch. So details on that later.

What else? Java??? Seriously, although I can see the languages’ power and potential as well a pretty safe choice when undertaking any software project, I wish Microsoft would do a deal with Jonathan Schwartz and include it as part of Visual Studio. With a .Net interop??? And Sun, please make your Java download page a wee bit more understandable to a  (relative) newbie.

Programming in general?? Perhaps something slightly more advanced than Hello World. Toolkits I use and so on. I mean, application architecture is a huge subject, as is project planning (UML, etc). Plenty we could go over in there.

At the end of the day, its good opportunity to consider moving any future photography posts to their own blog.

You never know.

By the Way

In case everyone thinks that I’m living under a rock, at the bottom of a mine or otherwise incommunicado, I’m  letting you know that I’m, not going to put a post up every time Sun buys a company (Storagetek, MySQL, etc) or Robert Scoble changes jobs .

Others cover it far better than I can. And you can get all that news from my Link Blog ( the most recent additions are on your right) .

Photography: Beginning

Whew, Photography isin’t easy. You need the camera, the software,the online storage and so on. Not to mention the accessories.

I bought a Nikon D40x a few weeks ago and haven’t stopped playing with it since. Which is one reason the blog has been suffering. Got a 55-200mm lense in addition to the supplied 18-55mm lense. And a flash and tripod for night shooting. Though I might have to take the tripod back and get a better model.

After thinking about the moment for a while I finally settled on Smugmug mainly because I get a kick from dealing with faceless corporations everyday (not ).  Take a look at their About us page to see what I mean .Plus they really have a good reputation.

I’ve got a few photo’s from holiday (4,300, to be exact - I went overboard). A good portion of that is from Luxor, Egypt and they’ll be the first ones up once I get them sorted. And I’ll cross-post the best of the best here.

I came within a whisker of splashing out and buying the Educational version of CS3 Design ( I qualify as a Second Year undergraduate). Though I definitely get it next month. What really sealed it was the fact that Smugmug  has a CS3 add-on for uploading your newly tweaked shot from within CS3. I’m getting it mainly for Photoshop, but Acrobat and Illustrator would be useful as well.

Once I have that I can start shooting in RAW and acting like a proper photographer .

One thing that really would make life easier is a WHS Add on for Uploading straight to Smugmug from your Photos folder.

As a side note I subscribe to Thomas Hawks’ Blog. He has some really great shots.

Also see this list of the best photoblogs of 2007.

Great things to come…

Nerd Humor

If you don’t read the Official Playstation.Blog from Sony, you really should be. Its really good and is a daily staple of my blog diet, along with the Gamerscore Blog from Microsoft. I don’t have either console ( 360 or PS3) , but I really enjoy reading the posts.

Take this recent post from Jason Coker, Associate Producer of the PlayStation Network title PAIN for PS3:

What I CAN tell you is that it has been a blast to work on. It hasn’t been easy, but it sure has been hilarious. Here are just a couple of the gems I’ve heard (or said):

* “Coker, can you write up a description of a little person hip-hop pirate right quick?” (Yeah, I had the same reaction. You’ll see.)

* “Ummmm….who did the voice-over for that? That’s nasty.”

* “Hey man, if I get you a big glass of water, can you step into the recording booth and belch for about half an hour?”

* “Check the Leaderboards, Son. Spank. The. Monkey.”

* “Dude, I just really don’t think the farts are loud enough.”

* “Did you just grab that Granny by her head? Do it again! Do it again!”

* “That’s him right there. We call him the Ooch Master. He can’t be touched.” (You know who you are at Idol Minds, and I’m coming for you. The student has become the Master, baby!)

* “OH, *&%*!! THAT *^&%*#@ DONUT!!!!!!”

What are you waiting for? Subscribe!!

A Word about Link Blogs

Scoble, in his latest post, reflects on what a resource his link blog has become as a database of all things technological.

It has almost no noise, just much of the best blogging that’s been done over the past year in the technology field. But, whenever I think about moving feeds to a new reader I start thinking of that database and start thinking about the value it has to me as a way to search back on what caught my eye over the past year.

 

Then it struck me that since I’ve subscribed to said link blog over the past year, and since I use Google Reader, I can access that same database as well. The addition of search by the Reader team just makes it better. It has some invaluable stuff in it. I share stuff in it more than in all my other feeds. I find plenty of bloggable materiel in there as well.

Which brings me to the question: What is a link blog?

I know, it sounds idiotic, like something web 1.0 guys would ask.  But think of it. Do you a use a link blog to share posts with others? Do you use a link blog as reference for yourself, to point to things that catch your eye? Do you use it a reference, but don’t mind if others share it?

The way we see the utility of a link blog determines what we will use a link blog for, which in turn determines the quality of our link blogs.

On the one hand if we take it seriously and only add stuff that is truly worthy of being shared, not just stuff loosely related to what we blog about. In other words:Are you in the business of simply observing the world go by, or is the welfare of your blog and link blog taken seriously? Do we/you intend for our/your link blog to be a resource - personal or public?

On the other hand, Scoble can be easy on his link blog - he’s posted cat photo’s there more than once. Do we fill it with stuff that’s not really useful ( and I am definitely a cat person)? Do we linkblog just for the sake of it.

Lets take a look at the old school link blogers I have in my reading list.

Larkware News: They put their links in blog posts. They’re up to 1227 posts today. lets see what yesterdays post post looks like:

• EZNamespaceExtensions.Net 2.0 - Yes, you can develop shell namespace extensions in .NET. (via Programmers Heaven)
• TFS: Check Out - Get Latest - Addin to make VS prompt the user to get the latest version on checkout.
• Smart FieldPackEditor.Net - A replacement for the DateTimePicker and a general framework for new edit controls.

• Introducing a Special Promotion for Small and Medium Businesses - VMware is pushing down the entry price on its highest-end products.
• Before you hire a tester (.net edition) - A list of things to do and tools to use to make sure your code is ready to hammer on.
• How to Write a Custom MSBuild Task - Tutorial from Keyvan Nayyeri.
• SQL Prompt 3.6 Early Access is now available - Incremental release from the Red Gate folks.

• Finding A New Job, Week 1 — Recruiters and the demand for .NET - Jim Bolla is chronicling his adventures in the job search world.

 

Simple. Clean and neat. The three categories are particularly useful allowing you to skip right to the meat of the post. The RSS Feed is here.

Christopher Steen. Same deal. His latest Link Listing:

LINQ to SQL (Part 9 - Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the control) [Via: ScottGu ]

Obscure ASP.NET Problem - AJAX Control Toolkit, CollapsiblePanelExtender, Image controls pages loading more than once…….

RSS feed here.

Kent Newsome posts “Evening Reading”. its not so much a link listing as a running commentary of the stuff he’s read. An excerpt from his latest:

Larry Borsato talks about a recent focus group in which college students said MySpace is over, Facebook might not last much longer, and their best source for information is word of mouth.  Paul Stamatiou is one college guy who has chilled on Facebook.  Thank goodness there’s all those grown-up bloggers to keep the hype going.

He posts this in the middle of his other stuff in stead of a completely separate feed. I tend to give it is quick scan and see if there is anything interesting, or else ignore it completely.

RSS feed here.

Sam Gentile often posts his “New and Notable”. He’s up to number 180.

SOA/ESB

• One of the things we talked about is the use of the term SOA which we both are perfectly comfortable with provided you go well beyond the 4 Tenents

• Just as I was thinking of that, my good friend Harry has a post too on going beyond the 4 Tenents

• Another subject was making the case for ESB as an Architectural Style

• John Devadoss points to Joe McKendrick’s colum: Microsoft: When It comes to SOA, just Do It! as an excellent summation of Microsoft’s philosophy on SOA, which is the way we view at Neudesic. Microsoft also refers to this as “Real World SOA” and Nick calls it “Middle Out SOA“

• See also John’s big SOA, little SOA - SOA in the Real World

• How is Business Process Management related to Service Oriented Architecture?

• Why Business Process Management is more than BPEL

• My friend, Shy Cohen, has produced a valuable Ontology and Taxonomy of Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture

• Nice piece from Christian: It WAS(n’t just) me: Extend Your WCF Services Beyond HTTP With WAS

• EDA: Avoiding “coupling on the name”

WF

• Silverlight V1.1: Talking to a Workflow

• VS 2008 Beta 2 Shipped : 0 to Workflow Service in 60 seconds

The great thing here is that they’re grouped by subject matter. You can skip right to what you’re interested in. RSS feed here.

After that review, I still much prefer Google Reader’s Shared items. All they need next is a taging for your shared items. ( I think someone’s already suggested that somewhere in Scoble’s link blog ).

But one thing is sure - link blogs are invaluable tools to finding information because  the information has already been used and promoted as useful.

There ain’t nothing like an oft used piece of information.

So. My link blog has a new lease on life. (RSS feed here)

PS Scoble says TechCrunch aren’t happy about linkblogs. I think this a first for a content producer to complain about link blogs.

On Blogging

Hugh Macleod, in his imitable way, has a list about why we now blog less:

Here is Reason one:

1. We got busy. For many of us, blogging created opportunities for us in the offline world, just like the early blog evangelists predicted. And as we found out the hard way, it’s actually quite hard to do stuff and blog about it at the same time. As my father, a very smart and observant man once quipped, “A lot of these bloggers seem to have a lot of time on their hands”. That may have been true in 2002, back when the recession was still on. It’s certainly less true with a lot of people I know.

Check the other reasons out.

[via Shel Isreal]